I must admit that this particular roundtable is fascinating to me because it’s built around precisely the sort of thing that makes many self-proclaimed cinephiles and movie nerds squirm: an admission of ignorance.

In that spirit, I’ve just had a look at the TOC of Danny Peary’s invaluable Cult Movies and have to admit:

I’ve never watched Forbidden Planet all the way through, even though that film’s Id Monster is crucial to my reading of The Shape / Michael Myers in John Carpenter’s Halloween.

I’ve never seen The Red Shoes—widely regarded as one of the best British films ever made—because at one point in my life I deeply resented Martin Scorsese. Scorsese wisecracks in Roger Corman’s autobiography that

There’s no such thing as studying film at NYU. At NYU they made you study Wild Strawberries. […] Every morning at NYU you had to light a candle to Ingmar Bergman.

Well, Martin Scorsese was my film teachers’ Ingmar Bergman, and I got tired of lighting damned candles to him. Which meant that the artists Scorsese couldn’t stop being enthused about—Minelli, Pressburger & Powell—were dead to me. So, no Red Shoes.

Okay, last confession, and this one is really painful for someone who claims to love B-Movies. I’ve…I’ve never seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show. When I was a teenager, I avoided it (for the same reasons that Wil Wheaton did). As I got older and become more of a film buff, it seemed as though I had to see it on a big screen, with a crowd, at midnight. And that still doesn’t appeal to me at all. So I still haven’t seen it.